


If You Are A Phoenix

by fleshlycherry



Category: Firefly
Genre: F/M, Introspection, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-26
Updated: 2011-05-26
Packaged: 2017-10-19 19:14:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/204296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fleshlycherry/pseuds/fleshlycherry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What would happen if Simon could cure River?  River knows.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If You Are A Phoenix

**Author's Note:**

> Written many spins around the sun ago for inlovewithnight's Lyrical Fic-a-thon. Originally posted March 19, 2005.

_And God help you if you are a phoenix,_

 _And you dare to rise up from the ash._

 _~32 Flavours - Ani Difranco_

Its scares him that I might get better. More than black, open space. More than bounty hunters. More than two by two. It terrifies him that his frantic late night scribbling and his methodical, glacially slow calculations will actually amount to something and that he will be able to bring me back out of my own mind. That I’ll be able to formulate proper sentences and that I won’t hear everyone’s voices all at once. That maybe, just maybe, I won’t need him anymore.

And when that happens he isn’t going to like the man he becomes.

Then he’ll have to try and love her like she wants him to even though he can’t. That just isn’t the way he works, he has to possess and she is like a wild sea bird. He would try and put her into a gilded cage but it would still be exactly that, a cage. So she would fly away and he would be alone again.

Then he would turn to flesh and stubble and gun oil and fucking and it would be good. I can feel how good it would be at night when he practices, but it wouldn’t be enough and they would both want to grip too tightly and they would tear each other to pieces.

Then he could become the man Mother assumes she raised him to be. He would sit in her shuttle and pretend to be civilized out here in a place that they both know isn’t and they would drown their sorrows in cups of sake laced tea and each other. Soft, silent, no names, and no regrets. It wouldn’t last long, she is too tall, he too cultured.

And that is when he would turn to the Latin. That is where I would lose him to the complex grammar and suffixes and conjugations. That is when it scares me that I might get better. So I swallow the pills only when he is watching and ignore the clearing in my mind after injections that work far better than he’ll ever know. I spin and cry out in the middle of the night with tears in my voice so that we can both have an excuse.

And God help me the day I can’t be broken anymore.


End file.
